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EcoCyc Funding Crisis -- Deadline May 26

EcoCyc received a very unfavorable grant review in February 2014. We are in discussions with the NIH to resolve this situation.

EcoCyc's usage has steadily increased. We made very strong progress on our challenging aims from the current grant period, and the project has produced many publications. EcoCyc received excellent reviews on previous grant applications. Furthermore, the needs of the prokaryotic research community for the content and software tools offered by EcoCyc have never been higher.

In the worst case, we will lose all funding on July 1, 2014 and be forced to re-apply. Even in the best case, we may receive a crippling funding cut that causes us to fall behind in its manual literature curation effort, and requires us to lay off experienced curation staff until funding can be obtained.

These events could seriously undermine EcoCyc, end the project altogether, or force us to begin charging usage fees.

To maintain EcoCyc as the free, up to date, and high-quality resource that you depend on, please tell the NIH what EcoCyc means to your research. Please click the button below to submit a PDF letter of support on institutional letterhead, or a short support statement, explaining the importance of EcoCyc.

We ask all regular users to submit; a short statement will take less than two minutes of your time. Students and post-docs, please ask your lab head to submit in addition to your submission.

5/16/14: We have received 54 letters/statements. We would like to receive hundreds. Your statements are more eloquent and effective than we could possibly produce. Please keep them coming.

Your letter or statement could mention:

How do you use EcoCyc, and how frequently? What information do you seek?
How would your work be affected if EcoCyc went away or was no longer up to date?
What level of quality/accuracy do you consider EcoCyc to have attained? Should we replace the manual curation behind EcoCyc with "automated curation" as the reviewers suggest?
Can you compare the merits of EcoCyc to other prokaryotic databases?
Which of our software tools do you find most useful and why?
Please describe scientific findings that EcoCyc contributed to, and relevant citations.
The reviews cited a lack of innovation. Is EcoCyc innovative?

We will combine the resulting submissions and deliver them to the NIH.

Please consider also posting your statement to the BioCyc Facebook page to spark further discussion.

Deadline for acting: May 26.

Please use one of the following two options to show your support:

Submit a letter of support on institutional letterhead as a PDF file (preferred):

File containing letter:
Please provide your email address in case we have trouble reading your file and need to contact you.
Email:
Submit a short statement of support:

Name: Email:

Title: Institution:

Department:

I use EcoCyc approximately
Statement of support: